So thinks James P. Rubin in an Op-Ed in today's NY Times. His argument comes in two parts. First, a minority of the Senate plays an obstructionist role, which means that the United States simply doesn't join important treaties: For much of the world, treaty ratification is a simple matter. In parliamentary systems like those in Britain and France, ratification is virtually automatic,...
Gotta say, even though I write about issues of self-determination, secession, and statehood, I didn't expect to read this on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times: At a glance it looked like any small-town fair, with smoke wafting from the barbecue, families gathering around picnic tables, music percolating over loudspeakers and doting parents...
This is a wild tale of self-execution (which, I'm fairly sure, is the first time anyone has used the adjective "wild" to describe the self-execution concept). For years, the Bush Administration sought to get the U.S. Congress to amend the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) to ease licensing restrictions on arms exports to two of the United States' closest allies -- the...
Human Rights Watch's Tom Malinowski and Ben Wittes -- whom, for the record, I consider a friend -- have been having an interesting and useful dialogue about targeted killing. Here is how Malinowski lays out HRW's position: Our position on targeted killing is that its use can be legally justified so long as it is limited to situations involving a...
Last week I had the privilege to attend an investment arbitration conference and FDI moot court competition at Pepperdine. Kudos to Murdoch University of Australia for winning the competition and my alma mater NYU for winning the highest overall ranking. There was much to ponder in the conference from the likes of Andrea Bjorkland, Todd Weiler, Anna Joubin-Bret...
[Anne-Marie Slaughter is the Director, Secretary’s Policy Planning Office, U.S. Department of State; Former Dean and (on leave) Professor, Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs. Catherine Powell is Staff Member, Secretary’s Policy Planning Office, U.S. Department of State; (on leave) Professor, Fordham Law School; Former Clinical Professor and Founding Director, Human Rights Institute, Columbia Law School.] With...
When asked the secret of his success, ice hockey great Wayne Gretzky is said to have responded “I skate where I think the puck will be”. This gets trotted out in a number of management texts as exemplifying the “planning school” of strategy. You can see how it might be applied to book publishers – I ponder what will be...
In this second post I will focus on the production of international law scholarship and what opportunities and frustrations are presented by online communications. To try and get a better understanding of the impact of the internet on legal scholarship we set off earlier this year on a programme of depth interviews, which were then transcribed, in which we asked...
On behalf of all of us at Opinio Juris, I am delighted to announce that John Louth of Oxford University Press will be blogging with us this week. John joined OUP in 1997 and is now Editor-in-Chief of Academic Law, covering books, journals, and online services. He graduated from Cambridge with an undergraduate degree in law and philosophy and with...
Jack Goldsmith has responded to my post about the D.C. Circuit's rejection of co-belligerency in Al-Bihani. It's an interesting response, worth a few additional thoughts. To begin with, it is important to note that Goldsmith does not respond to the substance of the panel's criticism of the idea that state-centered notions of co-belligerency can be applied to non-state actors in NIAC....
In Part One of this series, I discussed how to decide whether to write a book and offered some thoughts about book contracts. In this post, I want to discuss the calling card that every potential book author needs to obtain a contract -- a good proposal. Bill Schabas can submit a one sentence proposal that says "I want to...
In its motion to dismiss the ACLU/CCR targeted-killing lawsuit, the government claims (p.5) that Al-Aulaqi can be lawfully targeted because Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is "an organized armed group that is either part of al-Qaeda, or is an associated force, or cobelligerent, of al-Qaeda that has directed armed attacks against the United States in the noninternational armed conflict...
